With the development of electronic product technologies, the hardware versions of a series of electronic products developed on the same platform may be modified several times. To differentiate hardware versions, an identifier needs to be set for each product.
In the prior art, the product identifier is usually a resilient circuit, and the hardware versions of products are identified based on the resilient circuit. The resilient circuit may be multiple pull-up/pull-down resistors or Dual In-line Package (DIP) switches. The detection pins of the product chip are used to read the binary codes represented by the pull-up/pull-down resistors or the DIP switches so as to identify a hardware version of a product. For the pull-up/pull-down resistors, each detection pin of the product chip connects to two resistors, and the two resistors are connected to the ground and power supply respectively. With the selection of soldering the detection pin to different resistors, the electric potential of each detection pin is pulled up or pulled down to represent 1 and 0 in binary notation. The combination of multiple detection pins may provide a group of binary codes that represent the hardware version of a product. For the DIP switch, the switch creates a group of binary codes to represent the hardware version of the product. The detection pins of the chip obtains hardware version of the product by detecting the binary codes.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds the following technical problems in the prior art regardless of whether the pull-up/pull-down resistors or the DIP switches are used to identify the hardware versions of the products:
1. Multiple detection ports on the chip are used, and a lot of hardware resources are occupied.
2. A large printed circuit board (PCB) space is occupied, which enlarges the size of the device.
3. The costs are high, and the cabling is complex.